jj compatible release tool

[epage]

cargo release serves its purpose very well as a general release tool but it has a lot of local git integration that makes local adoption of jj more difficult.

What would an alternative tool look like?

[epage]

release-plz covers a lot but it feels fairly monolithic.

See also release-plz/release-plz#1019

[epage]

Potential workflow:

1. Initialize the repo with default actions
2. run the release tool to see the commits since the last release
3. update changelog
4. run release tool to bump the version
5. post a PR of the above
6. release tool posts to the PR a summary of the release
7. Merge it
8. release tool identifies the commit that bumped the versions and tags and publishes from that

Potentially the release tool could post to each PR a summary of the impact on the release.

Benefits

• Compose the pieces as you need, integrating your choice of changelog tool, etc
• User controls which packages are released by which get bumped
• Releases don't need to be coordinated with development. Releases happen for the set of commits you wrote the changelog for and bumped the version and not for any commits merged while this was happening

Considerations

• the tool itself is host-agnostic
• Opt-out for releases
• version-synchronization groups
• workspace version
• aligned with cargo on configuration
• able to track files associated with the version but independent of cargo (actions, precommit, etc)
• changelog tool could
  • check commitsx against cargo package --list
  • diff lockfiles to see what has changed
  • definitely report major version changes for direct dependencies, limiting to public deps once that is present
  • or filter commits for if they affect a specific package
  • check MSRV